Understanding the exact affiliate marketing KPIs you should be tracking is crucial for your businesses success. Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or affiliate manager, managing and optimizing these KPI’s can grow your affiliate efforts quickly. Below you’ll find the most important affiliate KPIs, how you can measure them, and how you can optimize them.
Keep in mind that these KPIS and metrics are able to be improved with relative ease. Let’s go through them now so you can start growing your business more profitably…
Most Important Affiliate Marketing KPIs
1. Total Clicks On Affiliate Links
The most general and cared about KPI for most affiliate marketers is the total number of clicks sent to affiliate links. Both affiliate marketers and affiliate managers want to see an increasing number of clicks being sent to affiliate links every single month. In general, the more clicks sent to affiliate links, means that more sales will be generated.
More clicks also can mean brand awareness is growing. Every business and affiliate wants more clicks to affiliate links. While clicks don’t always equal more sales, it is still a signal for growth.
2. Conversion Rate
The second most important metric to track is your affiliate click to sale conversion rate. Or simply put, your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the total number of people that purchase after clicking on an affiliate link.
If your conversion rate is not tracked by the affiliate program you are a part of, then you can go ahead and manually measure your affiliate conversion rate with a formula. Your conversion rates are important, because the higher your conversion rate is, the more profit your business generate. A high conversion rate signifies a higher rate of customer acquisition, less money spent on lead generation, and better affiliate growth overall.
3. Lifetime Value Of Customers (LTV)
One of the most important metrics for defining success as an affiliate marketer, is your total LTV. The lifetime value of the customers you refer to an affiliate program, signify how much you can expect to generate per customer on average. Why is this so crucially important?
Because if you are able to track your lifetime customer value accurately, you also know how much you can afford to spend in order to generate a customer. Once you know that, you can scale your business effortlessly if you are in profit. Because you can spend money on lead generation knowing exactly how much money will be produced.
4. Customer Retention
The metric that is the king of all profit, customer retention is the biggest key to any businesses success. If you can increase or optimize customer retention as an affiliate, that will quickly scale the profit you are generating. And more profit of course means more money to reinvest into your affiliate business.
Do your best to both track and increase customer retention. By knowing how long you retain customers for, you can estimate total profit and revenue generated per customer as well. All of these KPI’s and metrics work together. That’s why they are so important!
5. Total Profit Generated
The end all metric and KPI every affiliate marketer needs to produce more of, it total profit. No business owner wants to run their business on debt. This is why profits being generated is so key for any business to run and scale quickly. You can measure your total profit easily by taking your total revenue generated and subtracting your total costs from it.
Profit is key for every business to not just grow, but also so affiliate marketers have money to pay for living expenses. Take a look at the statistics generated from your affiliate marketing in order to accurately understand what’s happening in your business.
6. Costs Of Lead Generation & Customer Acquisition
One of the most crucial KPIs that most list miss out on, is the cost of running your affiliate business. Your costs and budgeting are what allow for your business to run or be ran into the ground. Make sure you are closely monitoring how much your affiliate business is spending on both leads and customers.
You can optimize your sales process, follow up, and more – in order to increase conversions and reduce these costs over time.
Final Thoughts
All of the metrics and KPIs can be optimized to generate more profit as an affiliate. If you’re an affiliate program manager, then work with your affiliates to help improve these metrics. If you’re an affiliate marketer yourself, start tracking and measuring these KPIs accurately.
Thank you so much for reading through this important list of KPIs for affiliates. They are crucial for every affiliates long term success.
With our kindest regards,
Jon Weberg
Richard Weberg